HP Mini 1000 Unboxing and Review

A Netbook is like a subset of a Notebook. They’re ultra-portable, relatively affordable, and they have decent processing power. A Notebook has more than enough power, but do you really need one? The HP Mini 1000 is good for doing word processing and any other tasks you may need to do on the road. It has 1GB DDR2 RAM, a 60GB Hard Drive, and a 3 Cell Lithium battery. It has a webcam and microphone built in, so that you can easily make use of VoIP clients when you need to.

Ponzi has a slightly different HP Mini, designed by the very uber awesome Vivienne Tam. Hers is red, with Peonies all over it. It’s cool looking, I suppose. I just prefer black. Mine has swirls all over the case, but they aren’t like overwhelming. They just add a touch of pizazz to it.

So anyway, back on track! The screen resolution is netbook-sized… 1024×600. The keyboard is great, with regular-sized keys. I’m quite happy with that. The HP Mini certainly does make a viable contender. HP is trying to think more along lifestyle lines when it comes to their hardware designs.

Some of the notes I’ve made just in the few hours I spent with it include that they’ve made a few engineering mistakes. The keys in the lower-left corner of the keyboard are out of order. A lot of desktop keyboards may not have the Function key.. and having it where it is on this machine will cause you to mis-type often. When you move between computers, you want it to be seamless, and the keyboard is a large part of that. We don’t have time to adapt to different keyboards all the time!

Another thing that I picked up on is on the trackpad in the middle – they put the buttons on either side (mouse buttons). It’s a little weird to use it in that way. Who knows… once I get used to it, I may like it. For now though, it is just odd.

Another thing to note… I don’t think HP is being very competitive on price. I bought the MSI Wind, and this one was sent to me as a review unit. The Wind has a few more features, yet the price is lower. Heck, the MSI Wind even has a 6 cell battery, so it lasts much longer than this HP Mini will.

HP is leading the charge when it comes to design. I know Ponzi’s review is likely going to be much different than mine. She’s been complaining for a long time about all computers looking the same. At least now, she doesn’t have that to worry about. Her Mini sure stands out from the crowd.

Email me if you know of another netbook that I should review and compare against both this HP Mini, and the MSI Wind.

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8 thoughts on “HP Mini 1000 Unboxing and Review”

My work laptop that is assigned to me, a Sony Vaio (VGN-SZ80PS) with a Japanese keyboard layout, has the same keyboard layout as the HP Mini 1000 in the bottom left. From left to right it has – Ctrl, Fn, Windows, Alt. It has a mistake too or maybe all your other notebooks are wrong?

I just bought the HP Mini MIE with HP’s tweaked version of Ubuntu on it 😀

I got a bit of a discount and after tax and shipping it was under $370 with a 16Gb SSD (plus free upgrade to 1Gb RAM).

My wife has the XP version (also with 16Gb SSD) and that was just a touch over $400 after tax and shipping. My wife loves the 92% sized keyboard which was the main reason that we got it.

The location of the mouse buttons takes some getting used to.

Everyone is up in arms about the terminal being disabled in the Linux version but apparently you can easily enable it again with Fn + F2 (so much ado about nothing really).

The Desktop layout of email, “broswer” and media on the MIE looks very nice. Sadly I have to wait for it to be built and shipped before I can play with it!

Having used the XP one I can say that the webcam is not good at all in low level lighting but the machine is nice to use and I have not run in to any issues despite disabling the swap file to minimize writes to the SSD.

For most people the size of the keyboard is the biggest adjustment to make with a netbook and HP got this right.

I bought the Mini MIE on probably the first day it was offered over the web. I have had it for a week or so now. I like the overall design and performance, with a big BUT: their media manager program, MediaStyle, doesn’t work. It comes preloaded with some stock photos and music, which are grouped into albums and folders that can be linked to the home page/desktop. However, if you want to add your own photos and organize them and access them from the home page and play slideshows, etc, you need to be able to “add folders” from within MediaStyle – and the program loaded on my machine is not allowing me to do that. I’ve combed the online and embedded user manuals, I’ve had a ludicrous and unproductive exchange with “customer support,” and the program simply doesn’t show or do what the user manual says it should be showing and doing. I guess this is what i get for trying the first generation of something, but it’s very annoying and HP is no help. I’d love to hear from others who have or have not run into this bug.

Well, after 1 day of ownership I am returning my HP 1000 Mini Mie to HP for a refund.

The system fan on mine was loud and on almost all of the time, the ac adapter did not stay securely connected to the power connector on the laptop and the restore image is not yet available.

I tried to get these issues addressed on two seperate calls to HP which lasted two hours between them as I was endlessly forwarded to the wrong department, time after time after time.

So despite liking the MIE quite a lot I returned it for a refund as I don’t see the point in owning a system that the manufacturer cannot support. If you call HP you will get the run around from one Idian call center department to another endlessly if you need support..

Just upgraded from the Asus Eee 701 to the 1000HE. What a world of difference between these two machines. The 701 came with that lame version of Xandros…while the 1000 came with XP. Also got the 160 GB drive on the 1000… compared to the 4 GB SSD on the 701. A Celeron 900 Mhz on the 701 seems just as fast whenever I watch video on the 1000. Either was fantastic for lying in bed watching videos or streaming video over the web. A “normal” sized laptop would have been too big for me.

The larger keyboard & screen make all the difference for me. With the eyesight getting worse the older I get…don’t see in my mind why I got the 7″ screen…except that they didn’t have the 10″ screens available a year ago.

Have loved both of the netbooks I have owned and would consider getting another in the future…especially since I bought the external case & an old HP DVD burner I had since I did an upgrade about three months ago on my desktop PC. Not only that…but for the cost & convenience makes these PC’s the perfect choice for many people who can’t afford an even bottom of the line laptop.